Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

“I’m sorry,” Van Dyke said.

“Sorry!” shouted Berling. “That’s not enough. I can’t go home. I can’t go back to Earth. I’m rich now—but there’s nothing to spend it on here. I could never lock myself aboard another spaceship for months. And it’s your fault.” He didn’t take a deep breath; he couldn’t. But he did stop and look around—and then he shuddered. “Right over there—right down that hallway? See? That’s where he first… where he first…”

“Stuart,” I said again, as gently as I could. “It was thirty years ago.”

“It’s not thirty years for me! I relive it over and over again.”

“I am sorry,” Van Dyke said again. “There really was nothing I could do, and—”

Berling moved with a transfer’s speed, and with the same violent temper I’d experienced from him at Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe. He leapt forward, landing less than half a meter from Van Dyke, and he rammed Van Dyke back against the wall—hard.

Maybe a healthy man could have taken it. And, of course, if this Van Dyke had been one of his transfer copies, he’d have survived it easily. But he wasn’t—and he didn’t. Berling’s open palm crushed Van Dyke’s chest. Berling took a step back, a look of horror on his face—as dramatic as a transfer’s expression could get. “Oh, God…” he said.

Van Dyke crumpled to the floor. I rushed in and felt for a pulse. “His heart’s stopped.”

“Oh, God…” Berling said again, very softly.

I stretched Van Dyke out on his back and placed hands over his sternum to start chest compressions, but—

But his sternum was caved in and it felt as though the heart beneath it had been crushed. There was nothing to lose by this point, and so I did the compressions, but I could feel bone breaking further and an appalling squishiness beneath it all.

“Oh, God…” Berling said for a third time. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t want…” His jaw dropped. “I—I just wanted to talk to him.”

“You killed that man,” said Rory, speaking at last, his voice faint.

“I—I’m sorry. I—”

Rory did a series of body and facial movements that I guess were akin to taking a deep breath; he was clearly composing himself, and thinking about what to say. “All right, okay, I understand that you were a victim of abuse, but… but he wasn’t the abuser, and…” He paused and shook his mechanical head slightly. “I’m sorry, you poor blighter, but you must know that even the NKPD won’t be able to turn a blind eye to your killing him. InnerSystem is a division of Slapcoff Interplanetary; they’ll demand to know what happened to their crew member, and the police will have to investigate.”

Berling spun on his heel. I’d seen biologicals take hostages before: they often put an arm around someone’s neck from behind—but even a broken neck could be repaired on a transfer. Instead, Berling had reached around from behind to clasp Pickover’s forehead. His other arm had grabbed one of Rory’s own just below the elbow. He propelled the paleontologist into the airlock.

“Don’t take him,” I said. “Take me. I’m the better hostage—you can easily overpower me.”

“No dice,” said Berling. “The police have that disruptor thing. They won’t dare use it on me so long as I’m next to this guy.”

“Alex…” said Rory, pleadingly.

Berling squeezed, and I saw indentations, like the beginning of finger holes for a bowling ball, appear in Rory’s forehead. “Shut up!” snapped Berling. Rory did so. Berling released his grip on Rory’s arm just long enough to pull the inner airlock door closed. There were a couple of minutes until the cycling process would finish, so I went down on one knee next to Van Dyke to see if there was anything at all that could be done, but he was gone.

I put on my fishbowl. The light above the airlock door turned green: Berling and Pickover had exited and were presumably now making their way down the ramp to the ground. Neither of them needed to eat or drink, and they could go months without charging up; my guess was that Berling would drag Rory out into the Martian desert. Of course, Rory still had a tracking chip in him, unbeknownst to Berling. But it would be better to stop them on the open planitia, rather than let them get somewhere that could be defended.

I cycled through the airlock as quickly as I could, and—

And whatever combinations of people Mac had chosen to get him and the meese out of the Kathryn Denning hadn’t worked as intended. Berling and Rory were halfway down the ramp that led from the airlock to the ground, Berling still holding Rory’s arm and clutching his skull. One of the meese was sprawled face down about twenty meters to the right—Mac had apparently used the disruptor on him—and the other moose and Mac were facing off against each other about forty meters farther along.

Merely resisting arrest wasn’t cause to use deadly force, and Mac, who ultimately worked for Howard Slapcoff, would be the last guy in the solar system to say a transfer was entitled to less than a biological was; the first moose must have actively attacked him.

Right now, Mac’s back was to me. He had the disruptor disk aimed at the second moose, and they seemed to be at an impasse: the moose was refusing to move, and Mac’s only recourse would be to kill him if he didn’t.

Mac and I were still on the same radio frequency, and so I spoke to him. Rory should be tuned in as well, but his captor, Stuart Berling, wouldn’t be able to hear. “Mac, it’s Alex. I’m in the open airlock of the Kathryn Denning behind you. A transfer named Stuart Berling came storming in, and he’s killed Van Dyke and taken Dr. Pickover captive; they’re on the ramp in front of me.”

There was silence long enough that I thought Mac’s radio must be on the fritz. But then Mac’s brogue came through, punctuated by some static; I wondered if the fact that he’d recently fired the disruptor had anything to do with that. “Aye, Alex, I saw the transfer coming toward the ship. I tried to stop him, but had my hands full with the two goons.”

“Only one goon left,” I said.

“You noticed that,” said Mac. He and the moose were now slowly circling each other; I think Mac had started the movement so that he could change his perspective and get a glimpse of me. The transfer he was holding at bay would have already seen me and Berling and Pickover. “One of the goons took the opportunity to run back toward the ship,” Mac said. “He went after the incoming transfer—Berling, did you say his name was? The goon wouldn’t halt, and I had to fry him.”

“Yeah. He must have figured that Berling was coming after Van Dyke—which he was.”

Mac and the moose had rotated 180 degrees; Mac was now looking right at me. Berling and his captive Pickover were standing motionless halfway down the ramp.

“Mac,” I said, speaking again after a pause, “are you in radio communication with the transfer thug?”

“Aye, I can be.”

“What frequency?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Switching,” I said, touching controls on my wrist. Then: “Okay, big fella. This is Alex Lomax. Which one are you? Uno or Dos?”

There was a pause while he thought—presumably not about what the answer was, but rather about whether to answer at all. But at last, he did. “Uno.”

“Okay, Uno, I want you to consider something. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the guy you call Actual—the actual Willem Van Dyke—is dead.”

“You’ll pay for that!”

“Hang tight. I didn’t do it. But he is gone; sorry about that. And you know Tres got wasted at my apartment, and Dos is lying in a heap over there.” I pointed. “No Actual. No other duplicates. Just you. That means you are Willem Van Dyke. Under Durksen v. Hawksworth, under the laws of just about every country: the biological original is gone and one transfer exists. You are Willem Van Dyke now. Sure, maybe Detective McCrae can pin a few petty things on you, and maybe he can’t—he’d have to prove that you personally, not Dos or Tres, were responsible, and that’d take some doing. But even if he can, you’re potentially immortal now; don’t squander that. We can all walk away from this.”